sflorlando
100 W
Hello All,
Let me start off with a little background. My nephew an engineering student at FSU asked if I had any ideas on something missing in the marketplace. His school is offering grants for business ideas. Of course the first thing to come to my mind was EBIKES!
Like many of you I have been actively watching the forums, browsing craigslist and ebay looking for the perfect ebike frame. I always get very excited when I see the next ebike and am always sadly disappointed when I notice the bike is simply vaporware with a release date of sometime next year.
Sure there are some really nice frames out there that are available for purchase now: http://www.torquebikes.com/, https://www.phasorcycles.com/, http://www.greyb.org/ but again I am disappointed when I see the 3-6 month waiting period, and the $1000-$3000 price tag, for just the frame. There designs are awesome and praise should be given to them for the risks they have taken, but we need something everyone can afford to push the ebike revolution!
On the other side of the spectrum are cheap bikes you can get at walmart. $100 for a fully functional bike…are you kidding me.
Makes you wonder why the guys from phasor or greyborg just don’t go out and have china mass make them. Its all about capital investment, quantity of scale and assumed risk in the marketplace. Sure walmart can get bikes for $100 each since they buy them at 100,000 units a time. There has to be a middle ground. A strike even point where we can get a thousand frames built that gets the price around where we need, yet large enough that a manufacturer either here or broad can make them cheaply. I know we wont hit hundred dollars but maybe we can hit three to four hundred.
Introduce the solution...Kickstarter.com. Kickstarter is a cool website that allows designers, developer’s, idea men an avenue to introduce something to the world. If people like the product they invest in it. If they don’t, then nothing happens…all money is returned, nothing is wasted except the time coming up with the ad.
Ebikes on kickstarter is nothing new.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/faradaybikes/faraday-porteur
This is a bike that came out that got $180,000 in funding to make not vaporware. They sold more than 200 of those boutique bikes for $3500.00 each.
More than that…According to their ad, here are some of their actual numbers. There was 63 people that gave $5 for nothing, 79 people that gave $15. 96 people that gave $35 for a t-shit. 27 people that gave $100 for a poster. 5 people that gave $150. 4 that gave $250. In other words...$9,130.00 was given to the project that never received a bike.
We need to come up with an actual product, have some one build it, get some marketing people involved, get some manufacturing people involved. Have a company in china manufacture it if there are enough people that want it. Come up with something that we can get funded. Hopefully we can do something better that the ugly faraday bike. We start off with something that quite a few people would want…a complete ebike, sell a bunch of frames to people that want to build their own, sell some random stuff (t-shirts, bamboo mouse pads, flipflops, etc) for donating to the cause. All we need is a cool design, a save the world theme, and a complete working prototype, and we may get this off the ground!
Who knows, there are tons of examples on kickstarter that seemed small but became very successful projects.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console?ref=most-funded
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...dable-professional-3d-printer?ref=most-funded
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/lifx-the-light-bulb-reinvented?ref=most-funded
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game?ref=most-funded
We need a custom made ebike frame for the masses! An ebike frame with plenty of battery storage, customizeable swing arms (Yes David its time for a full suspension bike!) with huge beefy torque arms. We can sell a complete ebike with some cheap geared motors along with some cheap SLA batteries. The people on this forum will not want the complete bike, but what it will do is give us plenty of room for our batteries. It will allow us to sell more bikes. Get the price down cheaper.
Now I dont have any preconceived thoughts that this will be easy. That there will not be huge hiccups along the way, but I think with the E-sphere's help we can come up with something that many people will like (not everyone). We have some extremely gifted engineers, marketting people, business minded people and other people that we should be able to pull our minds together and come up with something.
Again on the other side we do have some very strong headed people that will
say we cant do this, that it is impossible, but I think we can get past that and come up with something amazing!
I'm throwing this out on the forum to get some feedback and some assistance and to find out if anyone is interested in the idea.
Let me start off with a little background. My nephew an engineering student at FSU asked if I had any ideas on something missing in the marketplace. His school is offering grants for business ideas. Of course the first thing to come to my mind was EBIKES!
Like many of you I have been actively watching the forums, browsing craigslist and ebay looking for the perfect ebike frame. I always get very excited when I see the next ebike and am always sadly disappointed when I notice the bike is simply vaporware with a release date of sometime next year.
Sure there are some really nice frames out there that are available for purchase now: http://www.torquebikes.com/, https://www.phasorcycles.com/, http://www.greyb.org/ but again I am disappointed when I see the 3-6 month waiting period, and the $1000-$3000 price tag, for just the frame. There designs are awesome and praise should be given to them for the risks they have taken, but we need something everyone can afford to push the ebike revolution!
On the other side of the spectrum are cheap bikes you can get at walmart. $100 for a fully functional bike…are you kidding me.
Makes you wonder why the guys from phasor or greyborg just don’t go out and have china mass make them. Its all about capital investment, quantity of scale and assumed risk in the marketplace. Sure walmart can get bikes for $100 each since they buy them at 100,000 units a time. There has to be a middle ground. A strike even point where we can get a thousand frames built that gets the price around where we need, yet large enough that a manufacturer either here or broad can make them cheaply. I know we wont hit hundred dollars but maybe we can hit three to four hundred.
Introduce the solution...Kickstarter.com. Kickstarter is a cool website that allows designers, developer’s, idea men an avenue to introduce something to the world. If people like the product they invest in it. If they don’t, then nothing happens…all money is returned, nothing is wasted except the time coming up with the ad.
Ebikes on kickstarter is nothing new.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/faradaybikes/faraday-porteur
This is a bike that came out that got $180,000 in funding to make not vaporware. They sold more than 200 of those boutique bikes for $3500.00 each.
More than that…According to their ad, here are some of their actual numbers. There was 63 people that gave $5 for nothing, 79 people that gave $15. 96 people that gave $35 for a t-shit. 27 people that gave $100 for a poster. 5 people that gave $150. 4 that gave $250. In other words...$9,130.00 was given to the project that never received a bike.
We need to come up with an actual product, have some one build it, get some marketing people involved, get some manufacturing people involved. Have a company in china manufacture it if there are enough people that want it. Come up with something that we can get funded. Hopefully we can do something better that the ugly faraday bike. We start off with something that quite a few people would want…a complete ebike, sell a bunch of frames to people that want to build their own, sell some random stuff (t-shirts, bamboo mouse pads, flipflops, etc) for donating to the cause. All we need is a cool design, a save the world theme, and a complete working prototype, and we may get this off the ground!
Who knows, there are tons of examples on kickstarter that seemed small but became very successful projects.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console?ref=most-funded
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...dable-professional-3d-printer?ref=most-funded
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/lifx-the-light-bulb-reinvented?ref=most-funded
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game?ref=most-funded
We need a custom made ebike frame for the masses! An ebike frame with plenty of battery storage, customizeable swing arms (Yes David its time for a full suspension bike!) with huge beefy torque arms. We can sell a complete ebike with some cheap geared motors along with some cheap SLA batteries. The people on this forum will not want the complete bike, but what it will do is give us plenty of room for our batteries. It will allow us to sell more bikes. Get the price down cheaper.
Now I dont have any preconceived thoughts that this will be easy. That there will not be huge hiccups along the way, but I think with the E-sphere's help we can come up with something that many people will like (not everyone). We have some extremely gifted engineers, marketting people, business minded people and other people that we should be able to pull our minds together and come up with something.
Again on the other side we do have some very strong headed people that will
say we cant do this, that it is impossible, but I think we can get past that and come up with something amazing!
I'm throwing this out on the forum to get some feedback and some assistance and to find out if anyone is interested in the idea.